Hi, I am getting close to organizing my site how I want. Right now one of the issues is to display the items in a category in a more orderly manner. For instance. I have a Working Group Category and it has subcategories. There is also news associated with working groups, and documents. On the working group categories page, it has a listing of the groups, and then under that things get a little messy. It lists associated items - documents and news - but with no headings and separators. What I need is something like

Working Groups Main Page

Listing of Groups

Latest News for all groups

Document categories

In other words, I need the Items to appear as discrete blocks of content on the main Working Groups page.

Any ideas? Maybe I need to turn off item display in categories and accomplish with modules?

Thanks!

Or, if it is easier, I can not use the category page to accomplish above, but rather have a working group item and handle the custom display by inserting everything somehow into the article? Really confused as to how best achieve what I am describing above...

You have two options.

1) Use K2 Content modules to display these items or
2) Use the latest items from categories layout and display a certain amount of items from these specified categories.

If the amount of items is pretty much fixed and rather small eg no more than 10 per subcategory I would go with the latter solution.

Hi, thanks for the tip. I think modules will probably be the way to go. Do you know if there is a way to use the modules dynamically, to create virtual modules without having to actually create modules? So there would be calls like

{loadcontent id1=1|id2=2...}

thanks!

The {loadmodule} method can be used (core Joomla! method, you might need to google it) but you still need to create actual modules.

Hi, in general, for the sort of customized display I am looking to do, what is better: modules or plugins?

thanks! Brian

I would say plugins.
It is more extendable that way.